Review: Snow White (2025)

Once upon a time, there was Disney magic. What is it? Hard to say. We only know how it makes us feel, and we know that as we get older, that feeling becomes more and more difficult to recapture. It doesn't help that Disney floods the market with remakes, reboots, and sequels, watering down a once-potent brand that many of us associate with originality. Disney Head Honcho Bob Iger calls it "IP mining," a term that is as accurate as it is cynical. 

With this baggage, I went into Snow White hoping for a spark of that thing that largely now only survives as nostalgia. Enthusiasm was low and my guard was up. After all, the discussion around this film has been exhausting, and it began long before any of us even had a chance to see it. Movies made before this modern era never had to overcome so much outrage before a single second had been projected for an audience. 

But before long, probably about 20 minutes in, my defenses began to lower. I found myself smiling. The music--largely original for this film--is wonderfully constructed, harkening back to the Broadway pedigree of the Disney Renaissance that began with The Little Mermaid back in 1989 and continued throughout the 1990s. That feeling of Disney magic, though impossible to define, was waiting here for me. Some songs from the animated film have made the jump to the new film. Others have not. No doubt there will be much debate, but I found myself captured by the music, the visuals, and the timelessness of this tale.

Snow White is a simple story, perhaps one of the simplest in all of Disney's pantheon of classics. There's no need to rehash it for the purpose of this review, but suffice it to say that it's all here: Snow White, the Evil Queen, The Seven Dwarfs, Prince Charming, The Huntsman, and the apple. This new reinterpretation of Disney's very first animated feature film is at its best when it sticks to the story as we know it, and when it deviates to focus on ancillary characters, like a group of bandits that feel like a traveling performance art group, it loses steam. Thankfully, at 109 minutes, the film doesn't overstay its welcome, even when it does seem to be padding things out. 

Much has been said of Rachel Zegler as Snow White, but she anchors the film well. I'm not sure if there's much--or any--charisma between her and Jonathan, the updated Prince Charming played by Andrew Burnap, but then again, I'm not sure the movie is particularly concerned with that, either.  Gal Gadot's Evil Queen is without subtlety. She only exists to be bad. This is a children's fairy tale, plain and simple; and things are played at their broadest. This isn't Shakespeare, it's storytelling at its simplest and most accessible, harkening back to the Brothers Grimm tale that inspired it. And therein lies the magic, at least for me. On this note, it's worth mentioning that this film avoids the modern children's movie cliches of fart jokes and  banal, obnoxious humor. There are no sassy characters who tell it like it is, nobody saying "now that's just wrong," and not a single scatological reference. Unlike so many modern films, even other movies from Disney, this film lacks the manic quality that has come to typify so many films for children. It leaves room to breathe. It leaves room for beauty and wonder. 

The Dwarfs themselves take a little getting used to, but that's primarily because we've never really known them to look any other way, and their original animated design was so iconic. This movie is going for realism, not stylized iconography. I'm not sure it works, but I'm also not sure it matters. This is not the 1937 animated feature, this is something new. That's important to remember, especially when we feel so protective of our past and our own nostalgia. The original animated movie still exists. Nobody has taken it away from us. This new movie exists as an additional interpretation of the fairy tale, and in a world where we have TWO Snow White and the Huntsman movies, it seems fair that Disney should be allowed to reinterpret the story that they made world-famous in the first place. 

Not every moment of Snow White works, but enough of it does to make me not only glad that I've seen it, but also to rekindle that spark of Disney magic that I've been protecting for all these years. Plus, it's cheaper than a trip to Disneyland. Snow White is Recommended.